News Archives: Firebird

This is it–the final week of our Year 5 Kickstarter, and to be honest, it’s going to be a nail-biter…

We’ve got cool plans for Year 5, and we’re really excited about our expanded line-up, but we can’t continue without your help! We pay all our creators for their pages that run in the magazine, and the additional costs of staffing, servers, and maintenance do add up. If you haven’t had the chance to check out our Kickstarter yet, it’s not too late! If you’ve already donated, please consider sharing with like-minded friends who love comics, light novels, games, and the Female Gaze. <3 We’ve still got some great rewards tiers available, from ebooks and paperbacks, to being able to read all 5 years of Sparkler in magazine form, to amazing commissions from some of our favorite creative partners. You won’t want to miss out!

We’re proud to welcome yet another new addition to the magazine: straight from the submissions pile and onto this month’s cover, the first installment of the drama-romance-sports comic “Null Point” from creator Amara Sherm! We’ve been dying to do a character-driven sports story for ages, and this one hits all the right buttons with a mighty backhand! Check it out. :-D

We’ve been busy behind the scenes, too! From new ebooks to bonus content to updating the book Kickstarters we ran earlier this year, we’ve been tackling our backlog and getting ready to launch into this new year of Sparkler–which begins right now, since this very issue is the start of Year 5 (and we wanted you to see what’s in store for 2017-2018). There are also a number of little upgrades we’ve been adding to the site, including a “newest page” button for comics instead of “newest chapter,” a change due to popular demand. Hooray! Our hard-working web techs are just some of the folks you’ll keep employed by helping to fund the Year 5 Kickstarter–Sparkler really takes a village to put together, and it’s a village that wants to get you sweet fiction all year long. We’re eager to keep the momentum going for the rest of 2017 and beyond!

Welcome to the hottest part of the Summer of Sparkler. :-D We’ve got yet another great debut this month: the start of Tacto’s fantastical ballet-piano romance “Firebird”! We’ve wanted to work with Tacto for ages (particularly because she’s done amazing work with Cherry Bomb side stories), and we’re thrilled to finally get the chance, especially on such an innovative and exciting project. We hope you love it as much as we do!

And that goes along with new installments of Orange Junk (new careers and cute phone chats!), Knights-Errant (featuring a particularly perfect mix of emotional torture and drunken flirting!), Magical How? (scary fairies!), Yellow Hearts (magic and memories!), Sunshine Boy (drama and trauma?!), and Uncanny Valley High ([virtual] teenage hijinks continue!). Plus we’ve got a podcast about NaNoWriMo and game jams, and how having a deadline and a community can help you reach your creative goals. It’s a whopping seven new comic chapters and the podcast in this special (giant) issue, continuing the jam-packed Summer of Sparkler!

And speaking of goals, it’s that time of year again…where we’re launching a new Kickstarter to fund Year 5 of Sparkler Monthly! Your support has been our foundation since our beginnings back in 2013, and we’re eager to keep going for another year, bringing you great content in comics, prose, and audio (and maybe more?!). We’ve brought in a lot of new and exciting series this year, but we can’t keep the magazine going without your help. We’ve been evaluating different ways of keeping Sparkler open, and our regular Memberships, which run in parallel to the yearly Kickstarter, are always a key way, but selling year-long memberships (plus ebooks and paperbacks) in this Kickstarter is still the best way to keep things rolling and make sure our creators get paid–and to ensure we can keep content coming to YOU, our beloved audience, month after month. We’ve got about five weeks to hit our goal, and we have special ~bonus incentives~ in the Kickstarter itself (check out the first one we’ve announced about a Sunshine Boy future!boys bonus), so please help us get the word out so we can keep great stuff coming your way!

And as always, thank you so, so much for your support all these years. <3 Let’s do this!